Posted
by
kdawsonon Tuesday June 29, 2010 @11:12PM
from the perhaps-metafont-ported-to dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Donald Knuth is planning to make an 'earthshaking announcement' on Wednesday, at TeX's 32nd Anniversary Celebration, on the final day of the TUG 2010 Conference. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know what it is. So far speculation ranges from proving P!=NP, to a new volume of The Art of Computer Programming, to his retirement. Maybe Duke Nukem Forever has been ported to MMIX?" Let the speculation begin.

It's pathetic that you think nobody else can think for themselves or come up with their own ideas and breakthroughs.

Do you honestly think that you can come up with the kind of breakthroughs that have been done in CS over the past 60 years without reading some of the literature?

Sure, if you write some simple scripts or basic applications, you don't need to know much about algorithms, but once you start messing about with algorithms and datastructures, it pays to at least have heard of Knuth.

Yes, there's a lot of giant shoulders he stood on. But he gathered plenty of pebbles on his own -- boulders, in fact. Wrote lots of papers. Invented TeX, Metafont, literate programming, perfect shuffles. Dozens if not hundreds of original papers [google.com] outside of his books.

Do one thing for me. Spend five minutes researching before posting. Or even just one minute THINKING about what an idiot you might appear if your post is wrong.

Wow, what a troll. I guess you're the kind of guy who just "comes up" with 60+ years of rigorous research in computer science. The grandparent is an idiot because of this statement:

I have heard of Knuth, but don't really know anything about him nor do I care to.

You must be the most pretentious asshole programmer in the world. Not only do you think the greatest minds in your discipline have nothing to teach you, but you are actively engaged in trying NOT to learn new things.

Makes me wonder why anyone would assume everyone on./ knows who he is, what he's done, or why we should care what he has to announce...

Seriously? To draw a comparison, it's like being a geneticist and not knowing who Gregor Mendel is. Or a physicist/mathematician and drawing a blank when Sir Isaac Newton's name comes up. You could be a philosopher who has never heard of Aristotle or Plato. Or a FLOSS developer who has never heard of Richard Stallman. A game developer who has never heard of John Carmack. I could go on, but I'm not sure I could find a good stopping point and I'm fighting the impulse to just be insulting. Your ignorance is appalling. Please just smash your computer with a sledgehammer and go for a long walk on a short pier.

I talked to a guy in Saint Louis once who was a genetic engineer for Monsanto. He didn't believe in evolution.

I don't think it's obvious that he would. I'm sure he believes that traits can be inherited and that by selecting who gets to reproduce, you can steer the new generations into having certain qualities, like breeding dogs to have long ears or whatever you fancy. Believing in evolution, on the other hand, would be to hold the position that the current plants and animals are the result of such a process, where the selection has been carried out by naturally occurring circumstances. Embracing evolution implies embracing genetics, but not the other way around.

Knuth doesn't stand out amongst his peers in his field as much as those examples you've mentioned. Peers such as Turing, Shannon, Dijkstra, Boole, Babbage, von Neumann, Hopper... (etc.) are all more importanthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_scientists [wikipedia.org]

(disclaimer: i knew who Knuth was but i'm just not bothered by those that don't when there are so many prominent computer scientists)

Peers such as Turing, Shannon, Dijkstra, Boole, Babbage, von Neumann, Hopper... (etc.) are all more important

Well yeah, if those are his peers, he does stand out from the rest of that Wikipedia list. And he definitely belongs on that short list, obviously after Turing and Church - and after Euler, Shannon, Boole, etc - around the same level of recognition as Dijkstra, I would say.

He also married one of the world's most awesome women, Anna Kang. On their honeymoon, she let a pair of computers be set up in the hotel room so that he could program when the mood struck him. No woman I know would allow such a thing to happen.

It has always seemed ironic to me that no one in the business seems to have actually read Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers and that The Art of Computer Programming is only half finished. It's no damn wonder that nothing relate

He has a deal with the mysterious British agency known as the Laundry. He doesn't publish the fourth volume and they don't render him metabolically inactive. Don't any of you pay attention to what Charlie Stross has to say?

drink a beer, relax, and wait until tomorrow for the announcement. Which is sure to be disappointing now.

I predict he announces that computer programming is best practiced as a semi-automated assembly-line-style set of interchangeable tasks rather than an "art". He'll say that programming as an "art" is anachronistic. inefficient, and impractical, and that the conventional approach and the people who promote it have been holding back progress in software creation because a faster, cheaper, more modern, dumbed-down approach doesn't appeal to them professionally or aesthetically.

And then he'll announce his new software construction method that can be done by ordinary people with a short period of training for 1/5th what computer programmers make. It works great, but it's boring and repetitive and never creative. It delivers software in a predictable amount of time with a predictable budget and reasonable (also predictable) quality. And the development costs less than half of conventional approaches.

Miscrosoft has been in the camp to try to simplify programming for years to make it more accessible. They have been failing miserably, getting stuck in often dead ends and each "developer congress" they announce their new approaches, idea's, trends,... and each year I think "yes, I can see where this need was and why the implemented this approach or feature", yet when you try to use much of it, it's like all other software.

So far as I know, Knuth has done essentially zero work related to the P/NP question; a lot of algorithmics and tons of fantastic work in combinatorics, but I can't think of a single significant result he's contributed to complexity theory. While it's not impossible that he could have some sort of 'outsider breakthrough', it seems almost infinitesimally unlikely given the mathematical context and techniques that have had to be developed for similar complexity problems. My money would be on either a formal open-sourcing of the TeX codebase or the development of a full HTML5 rendering engine for TeX along the lines of the system that mathoverflow.net uses.

unless of course, your Albert Einstein, Galileo, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, Ernst Ruska, or any number of other important members of the scientific community throughout the centuries. many of these people did not provide 'breakthroughs until well into there 30's, and most of them continued to provide useful advances in science well into there later years.

That age may well be when he had his insight on the speed of light being constant and time being malleable, though the actual work of course only just started.

The insight that the speed of light is constant is somewhat older and goes back to James Clerk Maxwell, whose equations are based on a constant speed of light. The only thing that was not clear was if the speed of light is also constant under cosmic conditions. The series of Michelson's experiments to find variances in the speed of light started in 1881, and in 1892 Hendrik Antoon Lorentz in collaboration with Henri Poincaré published the Lorentz Ether Theory including the basic mathematics of Special Relativity.

Albert Einstein's genius was thus not to postulate the constant speed of light in vacuum, or the time- and distance contractions resulting from there, but the abolishment of the ether as medium for the light.

Einstein didn't develop quantum mechanics, he was actually an opponent of it (his famous "god does not play dice" quote is a direct criticism of QM in fact).

It is of course a lot more complicated than that. He objected to some aspects of QM[*], but he also was the one who proposed the very first basics of what was to become QM, and he did quite a lot of work on it.

[*] The philosophical implications of the uncertainty and randomness, especially. He didn't deny the results, but he assumed there was some deterministic layer below it that would someday be discovered.

Breakthrough proofs tend to be completed by kids in their early to mid 20's, it's when the brain is still plastic enough for truly out of the box thinking but where enough knowledge has been gathered to actually work on the hard problems.

Perhaps also because they actually have the opportunity.

Older people, who may still be plenty capable while having much more experience, seldom have the opportunity (due to mortgage, family, etc.)
Almost all incentives are given to youth (which makes sense). But older people seldom get a break. I think this, more than anything else, is what causes peoples brains to go stale.

Also, until recently a lot of them had a lack of continuing education and a lack of fresh ideas. Someone young and looking to get ahead is going to put a lot more time in classes taught by different people and keeping up to date with the trends.

More to the point, Knuth is foremost an algorithmist. I don't think he cares very much about P $\neq$ NP as an ends in itself since it is probably going to be (and certainly is expected to be) a very abstract math result without much insight into algorithms per se. It's just not his style to spend much energy on it.

Some may laugh at this, but Knuth is a very practically-minded guy who also loves, and is quite capable of, playing with and generalizing these practical ideas and tools into theory. The "serious

- Knuth now has his secretary sending tweets for him.- Knuth got a Facebook account. It's literally a book of faces.- Knuth has convinced his secretary to view the most popular YouTube videos on a daily basis, and then act them out. (Her kitten impressions are awesome.)

But seriously, I'm hoping that he's releasing his works under creative commons. Bibles are free in hotels, but if you want the bible of programming and algorithms

A proof that P=NP would have much more potential to genuine change things simply because it would disprove a ubiquitous assumption: that P NP. Historically, when universally popular assumptions have been proven wrong, the resulting paradigm shift in the way people think about the matter produces some fascinating changes. P!=NP would give closure to an open problem but would not be so earth-changing because we already operate under the assumption that the premise is true.

He has announced it, and he has paid. Many times. For some reason people rarely cached his checks but stuck them in frames instead. Since pictures of these ended up on the web, Knuth had to stop sending out checks. These days you can get a check from the Bank of San Seriffe instead [stanford.edu].